Sony predicts losses for the PSP
Sony predicts that its PSP handheld will endure losses initially but will enjoy a lengthy life span of up to 10 years.
According to a recent Reuters report, Sony does not expect to make any money from its PSP handheld during its initial sales period because of both the development costs already incurred and the price of PSP components and manufacturing. Sony is, however, predicting a lengthy 10-year lifespan for the PSP system--giving it plenty of time to climb out of the red and into the black.
"If you're saying 'Day one. Are you going to be profitable on the hardware?' then probably not," said US Chief Executive at Sony Computer Entertainment Kaz Hirai during an E3 interview. "Hopefully, this will have a 10-year life cycle, at which point I'll look back and say 'Yes, [it was] definitely profitable.'"
Hirai also commented that the PSP will require between six and 10 games at launch, depending on how many of these could be considered "killer apps" that gamers would be willing to purchase the system for.
By Hirohiko Niizumi -- GameSpot
Post-E3: Devs To Get PSPs
Lucky game makers will finally get their systems soon.
May 18, 2004 - Now that the PlayStation Portable system has finally been officially unveiled, the whisper winds from the game development community is starting to loosen up (as is typical in the console lifecycle after the system has officially been disclosed in its entirety.) The first bit of Post-E3 news from the dev community is that, as was hoped, Sony will immediately be shipping playable PSP handheld hardware to developers for game testing needs.
Although we haven't been able to track down confirmation on this news through our development sources (we're just getting back from the show, as are many development teams ... at least, the ones who were given enough of a break to actually make the show), PSPinsider.com was able to track down a chat on the Tokyopia message board with a well-known programmer ('dylan' on the message board, and we'll leave it at that in case Sony gets nervous about it, but astute readers may be able to trace 'dylan' to his former UK company and current position with SCE ... and, I guess, so could Sony.) The programmer, who worked on the 'Bath Duck' and 'Harmonic City' demos (both semi-playable on the show-floor, and amongst the very few PSP projects to be as such) had this to say:
"Sony had final hardware for a few weeks in Japan - that's how we got our demos done. Actually, our demos are the only examples running at the show that used at least part of the full potential of the final hardware ... All the other demos were either streamed from the emulator into movie sequences or running on the real hardware but not using the full potential. There are several features of the hardware that haven't fully detailed to developers yet, two of which are very important: -- how to use vram, and the specs of the vector co-processor (which is *very* powerful)."
This reaffirms stories we've heard from many that the PSP demo reel at the show, while incredibly impressive, was nowhere near what they could have been had the programmers had full disclosure of PSP specs and had hardware to actually experiment with and output to (this also helps to explain why Sony would not allow direct-feed footage of any kind to be made available online ... if you want this evil to be undone, Sign Up and Fight The Good Fight!.) Developers were apparently coding to the original PSP specifications, before the unit was given a 16MB mega-boost of RAM (tripling the original count), and were working purely from development toolkit workstations with no clue how gameplay would output on the PSP screen or how game controls would work on the actual handheld. In terms of development cycles, this is fairly typical (and, in fact, still a bit early) for a system launching in Fall for Japan / Spring for the US, but as far as E3 demos went, this simply meant that they were not able to create playable code in time. (Demo reel schedules were also quite tight -- submission footage had to be turned in long before the show, and in many cases, before most developers were planning on hitting a presentable portion of gameplay.)
Also of note is that the developer quoted for this article makes mention of several vital portions of the hardware that were still unusable for programming access in the previous development kit release. Both VRAM and Vector co-processor access was only preliminary, with only typical system addressing instead of exact processor/VRAM pipelines being accessible. This not only holds true with several rumors regarding the state of the PSP demos at E3 this year, but also is oddly in keeping with the early history of the PlayStation 2 -- although the PSP is much easier to work with and has several established and/or locked routines for various processor tasks (as opposed to PS2, where coders must "go to the metal" in order to get peak performance), both the PlayStation and now PSP Vector processor code libraries have been areas of mystery for even game programmers in their early days. These special processors are what gave the PlayStation 2 its power and longevity in the ever-changing computing world, offering quick compiler units off the main chip to run certain types of code quickly and efficiently. It is unknown if the PSP's use of its Vector processor will end up drawing as much processor might as its PlayStation 2 brother -- running multiple processors, even smaller units as these, can be battery-intensive, so it may be to be seen what level of system usage the typical PSP game applies across the whole unit -- but the fact that the unit is not being accessed fully in this current crop of demos and titles can only help to boast for the future of the system.
We'll have more word from the whisper winds as they blow, and will also be making our own news on that same end. Look forward to more coverage of development progress as devs ramp up production now that they finally have hardware in or about to hit the office.
Quelle: IGN